`ANGELS' DESERVES ITS ACCLAIM; `SPIDER' DOESN'T WORK AS A MUSICAL

Every minute of the first 3 1/2 hours of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," which has already won a Pulitzer Prize and been acclaimed in London and Los Angeles, lives up to its advance reputation.

About the only complaint that can be lodged against "Millennium Approaches," its first section, which opened last week at Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre, is the long wait between now and the fall, when the second section, "Perestroika," is due. After the promised seraphic vision appears, and the angel descends in a blaze of incandescence, glowing in celestial white light and uttering her brief promise, a feeling of unquenchable anticipation sets in.

Is this the angel of death and apocalypse, or of healing and salvation?

It's a little like being a kid at a serial back in the '40s and having to wait a week to find out whether the endangered hero is lost or saved.

Subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," Kushner's witty, scabrous, boundlessly eloquent play presents us with a funny, mystical meditation on America at the end of the century claimed for us by Henry Luce. It is a time when a plague stalks the land, stinging its victims with black sarcomas, ripping their young lives away.

"Angels in America" works simultaneously as a personal drama, the testimony of a young poetic homosexual, and as his epic portrait of the times that have propelled America into an uncertain future as the 21st century nears.

Kushner builds his brilliantly interwoven plots into tense climaxes, with a woman wandering in her imagination at the North Pole, a famous and powerful man facing death from AIDS, a gay romance beginning, another AIDS-affected man shivering in his bed.

As directed by George C. Wolfe with a cast of eight taking on multiple, sometimes gender-bending roles, Kushner's epic comes

across in all its glory. Working with Robin Wagner's austere, silently shifting panels, and the Gotterdammerung music by Anthony Davis and Michael Ward, this first section of "Angels in America" cuts Altman-like from scene to scene, at one point overlapping battles between couples.

The play seems to have barely begun when the first intermission arrives, and the second act speeds by with equally sharp pacing. By the time the third act arrives, it will all be over too soon.

Kushner works in various styles, ranging from slashing satire to explosive comedy to hallucinatory whimsy. Wolfe stays with him, through every change of mood and feeling, as the play shifts from scathing comedy to the terror of AIDS.

After a stand-up funeral prologue from a strange rabbi, acted with cranky humor by Kathleen Chalfant (who plays men and women during the course of the play), Kushner and Wolfe introduce their pivotal character, mover and shaker Roy Cohn. In Kushner's interpretation, Cohn becomes an emblematic historical figure, the protege of witch-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy. As this look back in anger at the '80s begins, Cohn has ties to the Reagan administration.

As played with his customary high energy by a spitting, obscenity-bellowing Ron Leibman, Cohn becomes the homophobic homosexual who contracts AIDS but threatens to crucify his doctor if he should so much as breathe the "H" word. Cohn first appears with his own protege, a young Mormon lawyer named Joseph Porter Pitt, who has come to New York from the hinterlands with his fantacizing, Valium-popping wife, Harper Amaty Pitt.

Scenes between Joe and Harper alternate with those between another troubled couple, Louis Ironson, a lowly Jewish court functionary, and Prior Walter, a trust-funded Wasp scion afflicted with AIDS. As the play spins forward, Roy presses Joe to take a government job, Joe begins to admit his homosexuality, Harper slips deeper into her environmental guilt over the depletion of the ozone layer, and Louis deserts Prior, occasionally meeting with Belize, a former drag queen, now a nurse.

Each act of "Millennium Approaches" has its own title: "Bad News," "In Vitro" and "Not-Yet-Conscious, Forward Dawning." Kushner's method is argumentative and seemingly discursive, but a tightening plot line pulls together his random collection of scenes.

Over the three acts, "Millennium Approaches" plays with many issues, including a parodistic yet biting black-Jewish debate between the queenly Belize and the intense Louis. The Reagans, their friends and their children are frequently treated to cutting, hilarious attacks. And as the production shifts from bitter and absurd reality under Jules Fisher's sharp, expressive lighting, the dead rise. His ancestors, victims of earlier plagues, clad in Toni Leslie-James' elaborate costume-trunk rags and wigs, visit the dying Prior. And Ethel Rosenberg, electrocuted through the machinations of Cohn, returns to dial 911 for the hateful lawyer as pain wracks his body.

Leibman as Cohn provides the evil, self-aggrandizing cyclone that blows through the play, but he also has fun as an elaborately bewigged 18th century ancestor of Prior. Even though Leibman has the showiest roles, Wolfe has seen to it that the play is always a perfectly balanced ensemble production.

David Marshall Grant reveals Joe in all his innocent struggles and also turns up as a ragged 13th century Prior ancestor and a

furry Eskimo. Marcia Gay Harden shows a fey desperation as Harper, and then suits up as a Reagan Justice Department bagman. Joe Mantello presents Louis in all of his bitter intelligence and guilt, and Stephen Spinella gives Prior drag-queen style and racks him with anger and pain.

Jeffrey Wright brings a superior, yet humorous air to Belize and fills Harper's vision of a supernatural travel agent with hip pizazz. Chalfant effortlessly and skillfully transforms herself as the rabbi, Cohn's doctor Henry, and Joe's frontier woman mother, Hannah Pitt. Ellen McLaughlin also works protean wonders -- as a nurse, a crazed bag lady in the South Bronx and, at last, the Angel, floating down in a flood of light and color as "Milennium Approaches" comes to its supremely theatrical ending.

As the Broadway season goes down to the wire -- with Tony nominations coming Monday -- the other 11th-hour entry in the awards sweepstakes also centers on homosexuality and politics.

But while it boasts an extraordinary performance by Brent Carver (in the role that won a best-actor Oscar for William Hurt) and a valiant, glittering old-star turn for Chita Rivera, "Kiss of the Spider Woman" looks and sounds paltry when set beside "Angels in America."

This is a case of you read the book, you loved the movie, you may have even admired the stage play (produced in a recent season at Yale Repertory Theatre), but if you skip the musical, you will not miss much -- Carver and Rivera notwithstanding.

The arrival of the Terrence McNally-John Kander-Fred Ebb adaptation of Manuel Puig's novel may be admirable as a triumph over adversity. Burned, apparently fatally, when introduced at a 1990 workshop at the State University of New York at Purchase, "Kiss" rose from the ashes in two steps, first at Toronto's restored Pantages Theatre, then at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London.

Yet the drastically revised new version that opened last week at the Broadhurst Theatre still looks and sounds like not a very good idea for translation to the musical theater. Not even its performances and its Amnesty International idealism can obscure the fact that this is an overblown three-character show in a drab setting, with few songs that scale any heights of music and poetry.

Harold Prince, who has guided "Kiss" since its inception, seeks to re-create some of his greatest hits in this production. A catwalk high above the stage calls to mind the platform furnished the blond-wigged stars of "Evita," but it also becomes a "Phantom of the Opera" perch for the Spider Woman, as Rivera, clad in a stunningly cobwebbed bodice designed by Florence Klotz, is surrounded by a huge, greenish spider's nest projection that glows gigantically within the proscenium.

At times, Rivera's symbol of death, the deadly Spider Woman, also calls to mind the master of ceremonies in "Cabaret." And there are touches of "On the 20th Century," as the prison hell gives way to the glory of movies -- most notably a Russian melodrama called "Flame of St. Petersburg" that opens Act II. But in the unyielding darkness of Jerome Sirlin's scene and projection designs, this musical looks more like a flop from the nadir of Prince's career: "A Doll's Life."

Sirlin has filled the stage with constructions of bars, set against the upstage catwalk, stalked by the Warden and then commandeered by the Spider Woman. The upper levels are sheathed in

scrim, the better to catch the projections. But except for the enormous web, which shines maleficently in the blackness, the images are soft and broken -- even seen from the balcony.

Surpassing words and music might lift "Kiss" out of its gloom. But except for "The Day After That," the dramatic, Marxist anthem sung with building power in the second act by Anthony Crivello, as the revolutionary Valentin, the Kander-Ebb songs never assert themselves emotionally.

The slender Carver uses his thin but flexible and compelling tenor with eloquence and fine control, yet the numbers are slight -- from the campy "Dressing Them Up" at the start to the sentimental strut "Only in the Movies" that is supposed to bring the house down at the finale.

As for the immortal Rivera, now 60 and displaying legs that seem miraculously restored after her recent crushing brush with traffic, she has been given several numbers that evaporate from memory after she has warbled them in her solid, sophisticated, half-belting, musical queen style. Even her dancing, as choreographed by Vincent Paterson and Rob Marshall (who came in for the movie sequences), lacks the dynamism of her bedazzling work in the Kander-Ebb-McNally "The Rink" or even the failed "Merlin."

With her sculptured bowl of black hair framing her sharp features, Rivera looks like a Latin or French version of Louise Brooks as she sinuously slips in and out of the movie memories of Molina, the window dresser entrapped and sent up for child molestation. On the one hand, she exudes glamor and life as the star Aurora, centerpiece of Molina's favorite films. On the other, she becomes the manifestation of death, omnipresent in the brutal, fascistic prison where the gay and fey Molina and the macho and political Valentin are cellmates.

In essence, "Kiss" the musical tells a story of love and reluctant, suicidal heroism, with death always waiting. Yet despite Carver's poignant, engaging, varied and appealing performance, Molina's passion seems only pathetic, while Crivello's Valentin comes across as exploitive. The supporting characters -- Merle Louise as Molina's doting, failing mother, and Kirsti Carnahan as Valentin's upper-class lover -- are peripheral, except briefly in the touching quartet, "Dear One." And most of the rest of the cast is imprisoned in marching about and shouting the show's silliest chant, a cry for life on the outside called "Over the Wall."

Stage review

ANGELS IN AMERICA/A GAY FANTASIA ON NATIONAL THEMES: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES, written by Tony Kushner; directed by George C. Wolfe; scenery designed by Robin Wagner; costumes designed by Toni-Leslie James; lighting designed by Jules Fisher; original music by Anthony Davis; additional music by Michael Ward; sound design by Scott Lehrer; Benjamin Mordecai and Robert Cole, executive producers. Presented in association with the New York Shakespeare Festival by Jujamcyn Theaters and the Mark Taper Forum/ Gordon Davidson, with Margo Lion, Susan Quint Gallin, Jon B. Platt, the Baruch-Frankel-Viertel Group and Frederick Zollo, in association with Herb Alpert, at the Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St.

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN, book by Terrence McNally, lyrics by Fred Ebb and music by John Kander; directed by Harold Prince; choreography by Vincent Paterson, additional choreography by Rob Marshall; scenery and projections designed by Jerome Sirlin; costumes designed by Florence Klotz; lighting designed by Howell Binkley ; orchestrations by Michael Gibson; musical supervisor and conductor, Jeffrey Huard; dance music by David Krane; sound design by Martin Levan. Presented by Livent (U.S.) at the Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St.